Drone technology gives us the eyes of gods. Could it help us save arctic seals? | Philip Hoare

Images of harp seals taken from hundreds of miles above show their plight. They should spur us to action

This week, remarkable images were released of harp seals scattered across a fragmented and rapidly disintegrating ice sheet east of Greenland. With record high temperatures and early melting in the Arctic, great cracks create a deadly mosaic on the sheet, an icy crazy paving on which you can make out dark specks – each one a seal, peering out as if bemused by its fate. In such an inhospitable environment, viewed from such height, the marine mammals resemble alien life forms glimpsed on another planet.

By 2035, it is estimated that the disappearance of Arctic sea ice will mean that around 7.5 million harp seals will lose their home. It is another cruel turn for animals that in the 20th century were extensively hunted for their fur – especially the flawless white pelts of their pups. They depend on the sea ice: it is the arena in which they rest after hunting for food, mate, and give birth. The ice is the centre of their lives.

Now an extraordinary surveying technique pioneered by scientists from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and Wageningen Marine Research offers a slender hope for the seals’ future. Using satellite technology, superhigh resolution images are being produced in which each pixel measures 30x30cm. This allows for the individual identification of harp seals – despite the fact that the satellite is flying 400 miles over their heads.

By working in conjunction with a large-scale Norwegian aerial and ship-based survey using helicopters, drones and an aeroplane, an accurate count of these enigmatic animals may be possible for the first time. It is a measure of the climate emergency that we humans have to go so far above the Earth to determine the future prospects of the species with whom we share the planet. “The effects of climate change are most notable in the remote and inaccessible polar regions, out of sight for most of us,” Jeroen Hoekendijk of the Royal Netherlands Institute told me. “These new technologies provide a valuable tool to monitor Arctic seal populations and study the effects of the rapidly disappearing sea ice.”

But is it too late? Human technology has ever accelerated, with disregard for its impact on the natural world. It is strange how we sometimes have to see things from far away to realise their fragility or assess their beauty. The space race of the 1960s and 70s – which sometimes seemed like a race to leave an environmentally and nuclear-threatened Earth – had that effect. Courtesy of the Apollo moonshots, we knew what our planet looked like from outer space before we knew what whales looked like underwater. Even now, more humans have set foot on the moon than have reached the deepest part of the world’s oceans. Vastness can still defeat us. “The sea, everywhere the sea,” as the Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière has said, “and no one looking at it.”

We have moved a long way from Victorian surveyors prizing themselves on taking aerial photographs of imperial edifices by sending cameras attached to hot air balloons with cable-release shutters – even as hunters were roaming icy wastes killing seals to provide fur collars and coats. In 1880, a young Arthur Conan Doyle, then a medical student, enlisted in an Arctic hunt for seals and whales, but having witnessed its brutality – 800 seals were killed in one day – he quickly came to regret his part in the “murderous harvest”. “Amid all the excitement,” Conan Doyle confessed in his private journal, “one’s sympathies lie with the poor hunted creatures.”

Nor was 20th-century technology good news for marine mammals. In the late 1940s British whaling fleets employed Supermarine Walrus amphibious military reconnaissance biplanes – made by the same Southampton company that produced the Spitfire – to search for pods of whales for hunters to harpoon. Tactlessly, they even named one of the planes Moby Dick. “It is the gunner’s business always to pick the largest animal, which calls for considerable experience,” noted one of the team, eyeing up their target.

The aerial hunters were assisted in their deadly photographic survey by their chief scientist from Cambridge. Now we rely on our ever more stratospheric equipment to make amends, and the modern university of Cambridge’s British Antarctic Survey team are detecting walruses from space with a view to conserve rather than kill them.

It’s a remarkable trajectory. Now drone technology gives us the eyes of gods, in war and peace. It offers us a seemingly immortal, omniscient view, as if the whole of the world were under our control. Our planet seems reduced to a video game. Does it take this image of seals scattered in an almost abstract pattern on fractured ice to make us realise what we may have already lost? Or does this seal census signal a glimmer of hope, as seen through an extraterrestrial lens?

  • Philip Hoare is the author of several books, including Leviathan, The Sea Inside and Albert and the Whale

Contributor

Philip Hoare

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Record levels of plastic discovered in Arctic sea ice
Samples taken from five locations found concentrations of more than 12,000 microplastic particles per litre of sea ice

Matthew Taylor Environment correspondent

24, Apr, 2018 @3:00 PM

Article image
Arctic ice loss forces polar bears to use four times as much energy to survive – study
Other predators such as narwhals are suffering similarly as unique adaptations become less suited

Phoebe Weston

24, Feb, 2021 @1:50 PM

Article image
'I was peeing and a polar bear popped up!' Secrets of Seven Worlds, One Planet
Shooting poachers, circling polar bears, flailing four-tonne seals, singing rhinos and the world’s roughest sea … the team behind Attenborough’s latest extravaganza relive their thrills and spills

Interviews by Kate Abbott

26, Nov, 2019 @3:03 PM

Article image
Stranded polar bears at Kaktovik, Barter Island, Alaska - in pictures

Dozens - possibly hundreds - of polar bears are becoming stranded on the north Alaskan coast because they cannot reach the retreating sea ice

16, Nov, 2011 @8:00 AM

Article image
Arctic wilderness faces pollution threats as oil and gas giants target its riches

Melting ice caps, the influx of trawlers and tourists, and Shell's £4bn investment to drill for fossil fuels in the Chukchi Sea all raise fears

Robin McKie

21, Jul, 2012 @10:15 PM

Article image
Tracking polar bears across the Arctic ice | John Vidal
John Vidal: Though a constant presence as they hunt on the ice floes in northern Greenland, it's rare that a bear attacks

John Vidal

12, Sep, 2012 @2:38 PM

Article image
Fewer polar bear cubs are being born in the Arctic islands, survey finds
Rapid reduction of sea ice level due to climate change hitting population as hunting ground recedes

Damian Carrington in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard

28, May, 2014 @12:02 PM

Article image
Polar bear attacks: scientists warn of fresh dangers in warming Arctic
Two people injured in latest attack as hungry bears deprived of access to sea ice increasingly look for food on land

Suzanne Goldenberg in Churchill, Manitoba

04, Nov, 2013 @7:39 AM

Article image
Arctic oil rush: Nenets' livelihood and habitat at risk from oil spills
An oil terminal to be built in northern Russia where the river Yenisei meets the Arctic Ocean lacks the technology to deal with oil spills, say environmentalists

Alec Luhn in Dudinka

23, Dec, 2016 @7:00 AM

Article image
How a hi-tech search for Genghis Khan is helping polar bears
Researchers are going on a bear hunt, using AI and radar to spot dens and track the threatened Arctic predators

Graeme Green

27, Apr, 2021 @6:00 AM